Helping your child with:

Handwriting

Handwriting:

Successful handwriting depends on secure motor (or movement) control.

For some children (especially girls) these skills seem to come fairly naturally; for

others ( especially boys) they are not natural at all.

Children need plenty of opportunities to develop the following (this may surprise you):

•Physical control through large scale movements

known as gross motor control - controlled movements of the whole body, arm movements from the shoulder and full leg movements.

You can help by providing opportunities for playing outside, balancing, climbing, marching, moving to music.

Of particular importance to handwriting is the development of good posture and balance through e.g. dance, football, use of small apparatus ( bats and balls), cycling, gripping climbing frames, building with large scale construction kits.

•Manipulative skills –

•Such as using tools e.g. woodworking tools - pliers, screwdrivers, hammers, cooking utensils and activities e.g. chopping and peeling for cookery activities,

and using scissors (all things which happen naturally at home).

Fine motor control – to write comfortably children need to develop the muscles of the fingers that hold the pencil.

Try activities such as jigsaws, threading, cutting, and moving around small figures, animals, cars, fixing duplo together, finger rhymes

More ideas:

•Encourage children to develop dexterity by cutting out large shapes – •moving from straight sides to curved

•Strengthen their fingers by using clay, play dough and modelling media

•Practise letter patterns using large paint brushes and water, finger paints, writing shapes in dry and wet sand, sticks on the beach, use a variety of pens, felt tips, paints etc

• Use small construction kits e.g.lego, pouring ,sieving and picking up toys using tools in sand and water

•Using pegs, threading activities, pin boards etc, sewing and weaving, picking up and sorting beads and sequins with tweezers, sprinkling glitter or sand on pictures - all developing the pincer movement

To be good at handwriting your child needs to be good at hand-eye coordination- his hand and his eye need to work together

You can help him to practise this skill if you encourage him to;

Do jigsaw puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty

Use colouring books with care, keeping inside the lines,

Tracing patterns

Ride a bike

Play sports such as short tennis, golf, unihoc, bowls, table tennis etc.

Letter formation

The four key movements underpinning letter formation we refer to as

c, the curly caterpillar

l, the long ladder

r, the one-armed robot

z, the zig-zag letter

Handout 1 – look at the letter shapes and decide which group they belong to

By grouping the letters with one key letter it helps children to remember the starting point and movement of the letter

The four groups are:

Down and off in another direction, l and i,j,t,u,y

Down and retrace upwards, r and b,k,m,n,p

Anti-clockwise round, c and a,d,e,g,o,q,f,s

The zigzag letters, z and v,w,x

The letter formation we use with the flick on the end, is to support the children when they start to join letters together to create joined-up handwriting

Activities you can use to help your child –

These letter forms need to be introduced through large scale movementsfrom the shoulder.

Practice of each of these movements is necessary to develop co-ordination and control and to establish them in kinaesthetic memory ( overlearn the shape and direction so that eventually they don’t need to think about it.Try painting from the shoulder with large brush heads(decorators’ brushes)

The next stage is to reduce the scale by e.g.

Skywriting with the forefingerWriting the letter on each other’s backsSticks in dry and wet sand or riceSqueezy bottles of water – outside!Wet sponges on a board or the groundAsking children to write a letter with their eyes closed

Finally, this shape-making can come down to an even smaller scale in art activities using felt pens, crayons and chubby pencils

If you are demonstrating the movement for a letter make sure you are the sameway around as the child and not facing them

Letters are always formed from the top

The dots and crosses are added after the main movement

We tend to teach letter formation alongside learning the sound or phoneme of the letter. Learning the movement often helps children to memorise the letter sound alongside recognising the shape of the letter.

Only when the movement, direction and shape is firmly established should the scale be reduced

It is worth spending time at this stage to get the correct movement. Once a child has learned the incorrect way it is difficult to undo.

PLEASE DON’T TEACH YOUR CHILD TO WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS!

Don’t ask children to copy writing – this is a very difficult task and has little value

To write children need to have well developed fine motor skills - this means using the small muscles in their hands.

When toddlers start to write they often grip the pencil as if it is a wooden spoon, curling their fist right round the pencil.

This results in them using the large arm muscles to manipulate the pencil and this prevents them from making fine or detailed marks and makes writing slow and laborious.

To be an efficient writer they need to move from this phase to where they can hold the pencil between the tip of the thumb and the first finger.

Children needs lots of practice experimenting in sand, salt, and using finger paints and large markers. Once they have had lots of practice drawing letter shapes without constraints they can move on to using pencils and pens on smaller pieces of paper

Children learn the vocabulary of movement – e.g.’ letter d’ - all the way round, spring up, slide down and flick

Handout 2

Children’s names are a good source of learning for both phonics and handwriting.

We need to reinforce the left to right movement across the page, moving from top to bottom and reinforcing the anti- clockwise movement.

When children first start to write fluency of movement is most important, Size and neatness do not matter at this stage.

Pencil gripIf children are to develop a fluent and fast handwriting style they must learn to hold a pencil with a grip that is relaxed but allows for efficient control of the pencil. If childrengrip a pencil too tightly they won’t develop a free-flowing movement and they will tirevery quickly.

SuggestionsThick rather than thin pencil

Shorter pencil

Pencil grip or blutac

Where do you hold the pencil?

Which hand?

We encourage children to pick up writing implements themselves and decide which hand they prefer.

As children discover their preferred hand and they are confident with using large flowing movements they can then be introduced to smaller more controlled movements

Confusion between b and d.If children learn each letter of the alphabet in association with its key letter - l, c, or r it helps to prevent confusion -d is a curly caterpillar letter,b is a one armed robot letter.

In this way children learn letters as a movement rather than visual shapes and so they have a way of remembering letters which are visually confusing.

When children are secure with the letter formation we encourage them to

write on a single line this helps children to understand the orientation of the letter to the line

We refer to ascenders ‘d’ and descenders ‘p’

Using lined paper we try to show the children that the body of the ascender or descender is the bit that sits on the line is the same height as a letter ‘x’ When children are confident with the descender under the line, a top line is added to develop the correct height of the ascender.

Good posture is as important as good pencil grip. Children who write in an awkward position can have headaches, fatigue and pains in their shoulders, arms and handsWe encourage children to use their non writing hand to steady the paper and bear some body weight; the paper should be slightly tilted

How to help left handed children -

Model using your left hand.

Put a mark on the left side of the paper where the writing should begin to discourage mirror writing. Encourage tilting paper clockwise, paper slightly to the left of centre of their body.

Hold pencil a little further away from the end than for right handed writers to discourage smudging work

Most important of all is to help children see a purpose for learning to write. Whenever possible use a real reason to get them to write -

Invitation to a partyShopping listTo do listGreetings cardsLeaving a message

Drawing is the first stage of writing so encourage your children to draw –provide lots of interesting paper and writing implements

Emphasise that it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – if you want your child to have a go at writing for themselves this is really important

Finally, if you need more help your child’s class teacher will be more than happy to go through some of these ideas again with you.